[gambit-list] Computing pi with parallel gambit

Adam adam.mlmb at gmail.com
Sun Nov 27 19:02:32 EST 2016


Brad,

I can clearly see times when it would be preferential to distribute the
execution of multiplications, divisions (and square roots) to all Gambit
processors.

Maybe this is particularly relevant in places where the numerator and
denominator within fractionals, are very big, e.g. (/ a b) where a and b
are both the result of (/ (random-integer (expt 10 30)) (random-integer
(expt 10 25)) or higher exponents than that.

The point would be that a program sometimes not can anticipate when it will
run into such heavy operations, however when it does, generally but not
always, a user is waiting and it's preferable to parallellize it.

Could some kind of parallellize-math? setting be introduced, with what
scope, thread-local or processor-local or global?

By the way, how many cores could the fractional above be spread across, and
approx what speedup over serial execution could probably be attained?

And what about the same for the fractional but with the exponents doubled
in size to 60 and 50?

This is not a super high priority but thanks for bringing it up.

Thanks,
Adam

2016-11-28 4:08 GMT+08:00 Bradley Lucier <lucier at math.purdue.edu>:

> Marc:
>
> Because of accumulated roundoff error in IEEE floating-point arithmetic,
> Gambit's FFT-based bignum multiplication algorithm is limited to
> multiplying two numbers each of which has <= 2^{29} bits (on a 64-bit
> machine).
>
> Multiplying larger numbers falls back on Karatsuba multiplication, which
> cuts the size of the multiplicands roughly in half in each step, until
> you get back down to numbers of <= 2^{29} bits again, in which case FFT
> is used again.
>
> So, in fact, to compute a billion decimal digits of pi, we rely on
> Karatsuba to do the largest multiplications (and divisions and square
> roots, since they all reduce to multiplication).
>
> On a machine with enough memory, all the "sub-multiplications" in
> Karatsuba can be done in parallel.  I haven't figured out how much
> memory is needed; it takes a few GB of temporary RAM to multiply the
> largest numbers with the FFT algorithm.
>
> I believe it took about 16GB total to calculate a billion decimal digits
> of pi using the current serial algorithm.
>
> Once parallel gambit is usable, computing pi to a billion (or even 10
> billion, who knows) digits by parallelizing the larger Karatsuba
> multiplications might be a good test of the system.
>
> Brad
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